Category: Internship

Does anybody even use “afk” anymore? Or *brb [insert some activity or other]*? Life questions, I have them. But yeah, I have been away from keyboard for a while. Mostly still due to “LP’s Great Health Scare – ‘We’re Getting To The Bottom of This’-edition”-tour, but also because I spent a week in Rotterdam listening to poetry.

As some of you might remember, I was interning at Poetry International when shit went down, and although I was unable to assist at the festival itself due to just not being physically fit enough to run around all day, they still gave me a wristband to attend the festival with. Which I thought was super cool! I have tremendous respect for the art of poetry, which is why I leave the poet-ing to people who know what they’re doing and don’t dabble in it myself. #stayinyourlane2016

It was however very (for lack of a better word) inspiring to see and hear things that I normally wouldn’t necessarily seek out myself. I have a tendency to limit my “intake” to things I like, which makes sense since there’s so much to see/hear, so little time. The downside of this is that I hardly ever run into something unexpected or totally new to me. This festival made me realise that I do need to step out of my familiar zone once in a while.

According to my doctor, all infections have left my body, so that’s a yay! I still do feel run over by a truck, then stampeded by 25 horses, but according to her “That is to be expected”. My doctor is a very straighforward and practical woman. Despite not feeling like my usual self yet, I am very happy not to be spending my days half in a daze, only getting out of the haze it to ingest another pill – 17 times a day. Let’s just hope this vague lingering stomach ache subsides quicky so I can get on with my life in full force.

I did get on with my life in semi-force this week: I had to figure out if and if so, how I would be moving on with my studies. After discussing my situation with my teachers, supervisor and study advisor, I have decided to first focus on finishing up my final class. Thankfully, the resit for the exam of that class I missed due to illness has been postponed to January, so I don’t have to do three exams in one week. I will mostly focus on the general exam and also try and pass the other (literature) exam, but if I don’t pass that, that’s not a huge deal, as there is still a resit I can do in January too.

Work on my thesis has been postponed until January, which means that I won’t be graduating in February unfortunately – I am now aiming for March. While this is frustrating and annoying and it feels like I’m running a marathon that gets extended all the time, this is the only way I still have a decent chance at graduating this academic year, so I’ll have to take it. Slow motion is better than no motion, easy does it, one day at the time, one foot in front of the other, etcetera etcetera.

There’s so many reasons I’ve never wanted a Facebook: the fact that it basically started out as a Nice Guy™ initiative for checking out “available chicks”, the “closing off” of a huge chunk of the internet, which to me goes against that the internet should be about, the real names policy, which is annoying at best and actually dangerous at worst, the complete lack of security, the whole “like” culture which has stifled most communications on blogs, the “friend collecting” culture, the “my life is awesomer than yours!” culture, the peer pressure to join, etcetera. There’s actually nothing about Facebook I like.

As I have mentioned on this blog before, I have lived a detoured life. On top of that, I have a unique IRL name. I have a hard enough time keeping up with my own life, let alone with the lives of the people around me: I literally don’t have the time or energy to keep up with the minutiae of the lives of the hundreds of people I have met throughout my various careers, schools and other activities. And honestly, even if I did have the time: I don’t want to. It sounds mean to say that I don’t care, but it’s the truth: I don’t.

The vast majority of them are lovely people and I hope they’re all happy and well, but we’re not in each other’s lives anymore. So I don’t really care about their mother-in-law, what they ate this morning or their opinions about the current refugee crisis. And I honestly can’t be convinced that all people with hundreds of Facebook friends really DO care and/or are interested in each and every one of them.

I think this is what I hate most about Facebook and social media in general: it has made it impossible to just move on, to lose touch with each other in an organic way. Now you’re “stuck” with each other forever until you actually unfriend them — which often seems too harsh an action towards somebody who actually never was your friend to begin with.

All of this wouldn’t bother me as much if I had the option to stay off Facebook forever, but unfortunately I last week I HAD to open a Facebook account because of my (awesome!) internship. I even gave them my trufax IRL name. After which Facebook proceeded to tell me that I apparently don’t know how to spell said trufax IRL name… I am not going to use it other than as an inlog to post on a community page, I am not going to add anyone and as soon as I am done interning, I’ll delete it. But still, it bothers me.

It made me think about the cost of things, and how much I want or even need to compromise for my ~career~*. I have written before about me quitting going to places where people drink a lot. But what if this is the way people interact in my chosen future profession? What if I can’t afford to NOT to hang out at networking places with the booze and the bla? Should I maybe start drinking myself as well?

People say that having a career, especially in this field, is “a matter of wanting it bad enough”. Is it? And if so, do I want it enough? How far am I willing to compromise? Does anyone reading have any experiences, opinions and/or tips they’re willing to share? Because yup, that’s how my brain works: other people just open a damn Facebook and continue with their day, I start generating existential questions. And on to my Philosophy of Science homework I go!

* Just to make sure: in a world in which people have to mine uranium to survive, having a Facebook account I don’t want isn’t that big of a deal, I am well aware of that.

Yup, from 1 October on I will be travelling to Rotterdam once a week to intern at Poetry International! Seeing that I only have one (very full day) of classes a week, I figured it would be a great way to get myself out of the house and do something I enjoy in a creative environment. As the new web intern, I will be editing, writing and helping out with all other matters (semi-)directly related to the website. Yes, I have already greeted the copy machine and no, I don’t think I’ll have to do coffee runs. Though I must admit I don’t really mind doing coffee runs, as (back in my secretarial days) I have had some of my best Original Ideas™ during coffee runs.

Apart from that, in the past semester I have come to realise that I function better as a student if I keep myself busy-on-the-brink-of-exhaustion, as that leaves me no time to think. Because as well documented on this blog, thinking about my studies leads to me wanting to drop out and seeing that (if all goes well – *knocks wood*) I will be done forever in 19 weeks, that would be a bit of a waste. Understatement intended. Anyway, I am very happy that they chose me and am looking forward to my start next week.

In the meantime, I am still trying to catch up on my life: having gone to London a week and a half ago to check out potential MA degrees (and go to Lush) has seriously messed with, well, everything. Pictures of my adventures will hopefully be up on my Flickr sometime this week, I will make sure to post a link next Sunday.